Pages 475–489

Y.D.A.U. — Gately at the podium · first-time reader guide · all scenes

When you've finished these pages: three things worth a second look, at the bottom.

Same 9 November evening: Pat sends Gately out at 1800h for groceries, and he converts the errand into an Aventura joyride toward Inman Square, Cambridge. Mid-flow the narration hands off to someone new: Lucien Antitoi, mute broom-carving giant of a two-brother Québécois junk-and-mirror shop — first appearance, along with his brother Bertraund; you've missed nothing. Plain heads-up, earned: the second half is a raid on the shop by the wheelchair assassins, and both brothers are killed, Lucien slowly and up close.

Terms, in order of appearance

the Storrow 500 (p. 478) — Storrow Drive is real Boston riverside road; the racing nickname is metro argot, glossed in endnote 202.
Little Lisbon (p. 479) — Inman Square, Cambridge; real square, really Portuguese.
Millennial Fizzy (p. 479) — soft-drink brand of the book's era; it's been in the vending machines since p. 182.
Antitoi Entertainent (p. 479) — the missing letter is on the shop's actual sign; endnote 203 confirms sic.
F.L.Q. (p. 480) — Front de Libération du Québec: real, violent separatist front; here one faction among the book's invented ones.
Gaspé (p. 482) — real peninsula on Québec's eastern lip; Lucien's boyhood snow country.
IL NE FAUT PLUS QU'ON PURSUIVE LE BONHEUR (p. 483) — French: one need no longer pursue happiness. Stamped under a disembodied smile.
Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents (p. 484) — the wheelchair assassins, on the board since p. 89 and endnote 39.
the squeak (p. 484) — flip to endnote 206 mid-scene; the euphemism gloss is doing work.
585-rpm TP (p. 486) — the drive speed the raiders demand; endnote 205 explains why some cartridges read blank at the standard speed.
In-U-Tile (p. 488) — French inutile, useless, pronounced syllable by syllable.

After you read: three things

1. One sentence carries the plot across the street. Gately's ten-cylinder wake raises "an odd little tornado" of street trash, and a flattened Millennial Fizzy cup twirls across Prospect St. to hit the Antitois' pane "with a sound for all the world like the rap of a knuckle" (p. 479). That knock is the hinge of the whole scene: one storyline literally blows into another, and the book lets you watch the causality travel.

2. What's sitting on the shelf. Saturday's scavenged display cartridges — smiley-stamped, happiness-slogan, blank on Lucien's 450-rpm viewer — and a masked leader politely demanding the "Copy-Capable" Master and a 585-rpm TP (pp. 483–486). You know from the mountainside serial what's being hunted; the brothers never do. And this shop has crossed your path before: a "small-arms-draped duo" of insurgents behind a cut-rate mirror front sold Pemulis something potent at pp. 214–216.

3. The one with no words. Lucien is "one of the very few natives of Notre Rai Pays ever who cannot understand French" (p. 481), with "that rare spinal appreciation for beauty in the ordinary" the book grants those with no words for what they see (p. 482). He dies because he cannot produce the words demanded — "Words that are not and can never be words" (p. 487) — and the final sentence releases him north over the Convexity, "sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world's well-known tongues." Read it twice.

Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.